A very harrowing rundown of how much all the Vice-Chancellors at Russell Group unis get paid

UK unis are not living, loving or laughing right now. Lots of unis are laying off staff, and students might have to start paying more tuition fees. However, the Vice-Chancellors at Russell Group unis are practically rolling in cash.

I do get that unis need someone competent to run them, and high salaries attract those people. But surely if someone will only do a job for £400,000, they’re not in it for the right reasons?

Unsurprisingly, Oxbridge hands out the highest base salaries to its Vice-Chancellors. The head of Cambridge Uni is on a base salary of £384,000 a year. The new Vice-Chancellor of Oxford Uni, Irene Tracey, has a salary of £397,000. As per Times Higher Education, she received £232,000 for seven months of work in 2023. When her predecessor left, at the end of 2022, she got £712,000. So Oxford Uni handed out over a million pounds to Vice-Chancellors that year. The lowest salary – £254,000 for the Vice-Chancellor at the University of Sheffield – looks almost reasonable in comparison.

To make it easy to compare figures for different universities, these numbers are just the base salary for the Vice-Chancellors in the 2022/2023 academic year. In reality, many Vice-Chancellors make way more money than this a year, because they get free accommodation, generous pension schemes, massive bonuses and several expenses paid for. These stats come from The Telegraph, the Higher Education Statistics Agency and university websites.

So, here’s a rundown of the base salaries for the Vice-Chancellors at all the Russell Group unis.

University of Birmingham – £342,000

University of Bristol – £299,250

University of Cambridge – £384,000

Cardiff University – £301,000

Durham University – £290,000

University of Exeter – £290,000

University of Edinburgh – £348,000

University of Glasgow – £334,000

Imperial College London – £365,000

King’s College London – £295,000

University of Leeds – £330,000

University of Liverpool -£309,500

London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) – £380,000.

University of Manchester – £260,000

Newcastle University – £341,000

University of Nottingham – £311,000

University of Oxford – £397,000

Queen Mary University of London – £329,000

Queen’s University Belfast – £330,000

University of Sheffield – £254,000

University of Southampton – £316,000

University College London (UCL) – £380,000

University of Warwick – £326,000

University of York – £297,000

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